Tag: #PutinsPuppet

I believe that Donald Trump, his Cabinet and administration, and his Republican enablers in Congress are a real and active threat to me, and to the people I love.

Trump says he won the election and wants us to “work together” to “Make America Great Again”.

This is my response:

•I will not forget how badly he and so many others treated former President Barack Obama for 8 years.

•I will not “work together” to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security and Medicaid.

•I will not “work together” to build a wall.

•I will not “work together” to persecute Muslims.

•I will not “work together” to shut out refugees from other countries.

•I will not “work together” to lower taxes on the 1% and increase taxes on the middle class and poor.

•I will not “work together” to help Trump use the Presidency to enrich himself.

•I will not “work together” to weaken and demolish environmental protection.

•I will not “work together” to sell American lands, especially National Parks, to companies which then despoil those lands.

•I will not “work together” to enable the extinction of other species.

•I will not “work together” to remove the civil rights of other citizens.

•I will not “work together” to subvert our allies and the NATO Alliance.

•I will not “work together” to slash funds for public education.

•I will not “work together” to take essential public serves from people
who are poor.

•I will not “work together” to remove sensible guns control.

•I will not “work together” to drop the minimum wage.

•I will not “work together” to destroy the Unions.

•I will not “work together” to suppress and deny scientific fact.

•I will not “work together” to criminalize abortion or restrict health care
for women.

•I will not “work together” to increase the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

•I will not “work together” to put even more “big money” into politics.

•I will not “work together” to violate the Geneva Convention.

•I will not “work together” to normalize the vile and uninformed
views of the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party and white supremacists.

•I will not “work together” to deny health care to people who need it.

•I will not “work together” to weaken food and drug safety.

•I will not “work together” to increase voter suppression.

•I will not “work together” to normalize tyranny.

• I will not “work together” to cut ethical oversight at any level of government.

•I will not “work together” impose a pipeline for the transport oil on
Sacred Ground for Native Americans.

•I will not “work together” together to promote the lie that American Democracy is as corrupt as a Russian Oligarchy.

This is our line and we draw it because words like “winning,” “being great again,” “rich” or even “beautiful” are meaningless when we scapegoat our fellow citizens and degrade our most cherished Democratic values and Institutions.

One of the stranger aspects of 21st-century geopolitics has been the West’s denial that it has an adversary or enemy in Vladimir Putin. –Peter Pomerantsev

A Poster of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin as seen in a photograph taken on a Moscow Street.

I once knew a physicist who said he worked for the military on
something called a clean bomb.

“It kills the people but there’s no radiation so we can go in and take the land.”

I never spoke with him again but I never forgot the horror of his
Machiavellian disregard for human life.

That conversation comes to mind as read news of Russia’s Hack
of our 2016 Election.

Given what we know of the Russian Hack of the election we need to understand information as a weapon.

I think of bombs so clean we don’t even know we’re at war.

from Winning the Information War

If you’re one of millions of people still think the United States created the AIDS virus in 1969 you can thank a successful Soviet Style disinformation campaign launched by the Soviet Union on July 17, 1983.

A Fake Document created by the former Soviet Union to ‘prove’ that the United States created the AIDS virus.

“A small pro-Soviet paper called the Patriot published a front-page article titled “AIDS may invade India: Mystery disease caused by US experiments.”

The story cited a letter from an anonymous but “well-known American scientist and anthropologist” that suggested AIDS, then still a mysterious and deadly new disease, had been created by the Pentagon in a bid to develop new biological weapons.

“Now that these menacing experiments seem to have gone out of control, plans are being hatched to hastily transfer them from the U.S. to other countries, primarily developing nations where governments are pliable to Washington’s pressure and persuasion,” the article read.

The Patriot’s article was subsequently used as a source for an October 1985 story in the Literaturnaya Gazeta, a Soviet weekly with considerable influence at the time.

The next year, it ran on the front page of a British tabloid. After that, it was picked up by an international news wire.

By April 1987 the story appeared in the major newspapers of more than 50 countries.

The problem? The story was a lie.

A variety of credible experts quickly came out to say that the idea that AIDS had been deliberately or inadvertently created in a laboratory was ridiculous; even the president of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences went on the record saying AIDS was of natural origin.

Yet even after the Cold War was over and the threat of AIDS became more widely understood, the idea that the disease was man-made persevered around the world.

The conspiracy theory even persisted in the United States: A 2005 study found almost half of African Americans believed that HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, was man-made.”

According to the online New Eastern Europe, the “weaponisation of information” is an essential tool of Russian foreign policy.

To study this “weaponisation of information” I reviewed an archive of
political ads produced by the RNC during the 2016 Elections.

To assess the ads as propaganda the ads must use one or more of the following propaganda techniques.

Whataboutism: a logical fallacy that attempts to discredit the opponent’s position by asserting the opponent’s failure to act in accordance with that position in a similar situation without directly refuting or disproving the opponent’s initial argument.

The strategy is designed to turn the argument into a discussion of irrelevancies.

Example:

I tell you that Trump said on tape that he can grab women’s genitals because he’s famous and you reply what about Bill Clinton?

What about Bill Clinton

The story or video uses of words, music, and images in a way that subvert one’s sense of reality and to disengage critical thinking.

Example:

This Headline uses the Active Measure of working to discredit the CIA.

The story fabricates an all-powerful enemy with unverified accounts of outrageous behaviors and dishonest strategies.

A fear mongering word salad of lies and debunked accusations that spiral into a series of insults that ends with Hillary Clinton as the living embodiment of everything people hate about politics.

The ad closes on the gender stereotype of a cackling witch who shouts, “I am a real person!’

Script:

Democrat Senate candidates need to ask themselves a question. Can they really support Hillary Clinton? She’s a living history of scandal, lies and spin. Defended an accused child rapist then laughed about his lenient sentence. Whitewater. Travelgate. Chinagate. Filegate. She politically attacked sexual harassment victims. Pretended she landed under sniper fire. Benghazi. The Clinton Foundation. FBI investigation. Ruthless. Fake accents, fake concerns and fake laughs. Hillary Clinton. She is the living embodiment of everything people hate about politics. Democrat senate candidates, she is your burden to bear. I am a real person. NRSC is responsible for the content of this advertising.

Caught Lying Again

This GOP ad takes up the question of Hillary Clinton’s email.

We hear a montage of out of context quotes from Hilary Clinton as she responds to questions about her use of a private server for classified email against a musical backdrop of tinkling apocalypse.
The ad was released on August 25, 2016.

The FBI cleared Hillary Clinton of all charges regarding her email a month before, on July 05th, 2016.

The ad uses a collage of words and images that twists a factual statement into a racist slur.

Script

When we arrived in South Carolina yesterday, this was The State newspaper. Clinton camp hits Obama. Attacks painful for black voters. Many in state offended by criticism of Obama and remarks about Martin Luther King. Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It’s as if you are minimizing I Have A dream. It’s a nice sentiment, but it took a white President to get blacks to the mountain top

I understand why Americans don’t want to deal with the seriousness of this attack.

Taking a partisan stance is the easy way out and a possible path to our destruction.

What matters is that a foreign government attacked the people of the United States through our media to thwart our political process.

We must know how this attack happened, what the damage was, and what
we can do to protect ourselves.

Watts’s report on this work, with colleagues Andrew Weisburd and J.M. Berger, appeared on the national security blog War on the Rocks this month under the headline “Trolling for Trump: How Russia Is Trying to Destroy Our Democracy.” Another group, called PropOrNot, a nonpartisan collection of researchers with foreign policy, military and technology backgrounds, planned to release its own findings Friday showing the startling reach and effectiveness of Russian propaganda campaigns.

The researchers used Internet analytics tools to trace the origins of particular tweets and mapped the connections among social-media accounts that consistently delivered synchronized messages. Identifying website codes sometimes revealed common ownership. In other cases, exact phrases or sentences were echoed by sites and social-media accounts in rapid succession, signaling membership in connected networks controlled by a single entity.

PropOrNot’s monitoring report, which was provided to The Washington Post in advance of its public release, identifies more than 200 websites as routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of at least 15 million Americans. On Facebook, PropOrNot estimates that stories planted or promoted by the disinformation campaign were viewed more than 213 million times.

Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts.

The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events.

Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their reports, the researchers say.

Adrien Chen of The New Yorker wrote in a June 2015 article that Russian internet trolls, paid by the Kremlin to spread false information on the internet, are behind a number of “highly coordinated (disinformation) campaigns” to deceive the American public.

It’s a brand of information warfare, known as “dezinformatsiya,” that has been used by the Russians since at least the Cold War. The disinformation campaigns are only one “active measure” tool used by Russian intelligence to “sow discord among,” and within, allies perceived hostile to Russia.

“An active measure is a time-honored KGB tactic for waging informational and psychological warfare,” Michael Weiss, a senior editor at The Daily Beastand editor-in-chief of The Interpreter — an online magazine that translates and analyzes political, social, and economic events inside the Russian Federation — wrote on Tuesday.

“It is designed, as retired KGB General Oleg Kalugin once defined it, ‘to drive wedges in the Western community alliances of all sorts, particularly NATO, to sow discord among allies, to weaken the United States in the eyes of the people in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and thus to prepare ground in case the war really occurs.’ The most common subcategory of active measures is dezinformatsiya, or disinformation: feverish, if believable lies cooked up by Moscow Centre and planted in friendly media outlets to make democratic nations look sinister.”

It is not surprising, then, that the Kremlin would pay internet trolls to pose as Trump supporters and build him up online. In fact, that would be the easy part.

From his interviews with former trolls employed by Russia, Chen gathered that the point of their jobs “was to weave propaganda seamlessly into what appeared to be the nonpolitical musings of an everyday person.”

“Russia’s information war might be thought of as the biggest trolling operation in history,” Chen wrote. “And its target is nothing less than the utility of the Internet as a democratic space.”